Article : joys and challenges of being a parent with autism

[Fridgemagnetman]

The Joys and Challenges of Being a Parent With Autism
It’s going on 8 p.m., and Kirsten Hurley’s house in West Cork, Ireland, is a scene of happy chaos. The children—Alex, 9, and Isla, 4—have been promised chocolate if they stay out of their mother’s hair while she talks with a journalist via Skype.

But the bribe doesn’t seem to be working—at least not with Isla, who climbs up her mother’s back and somersaults over her shoulder, cackling with delight.

“This is something that drives me nuts,” Hurley says. The nonstop and often intense sensory inputs that come along with being a parent—being grabbed at, being climbed on, listening to the drone of “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom”—can be difficult for her to handle because she has a mild form of autism sometimes known as Asperger’s syndrome.

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Hurley was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age 23, when her son was about 14 months old. Alex received his own autism diagnosis about a year later. (In the United States, Asperger’s syndrome was subsumed into the larger category of autism spectrum disorder in 2013, but in Ireland and elsewhere it remains a distinct diagnosis.)

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[FreeDiver]

I have to wonder how many parents/families have become alcoholics as a direct result of the things that this story describes?